Jessica Eisen, assistant professor in the Faculty of Law, understands that when it comes to legal protection for animals, law is not only the solution, but also part of the problem.
In this week’s spotlight, Jessica illuminates how the legal system can end up creating harmful relationships with animals and how building bridges across disciplines can lead to more protective practices.
How do you describe your work to people who don’t work in your field?
I study the ways that we, as human beings, relate to other animals through the legal system.
What’s one big problem you want to solve through your work?
Legal rules and institutions often fail to protect animals, and in fact work to promote practices that harm animals. In short, law often fails to acknowledge and respond to animals as subjects with their own experiences. As individual human beings, we know that animals are feeling creatures, whose relationships matter to them. I hope that my work will help to make the legal system better reflect this reality.
What does the word “innovation” mean to you?
“Innovation” means bringing something new into the world. We are always building on what has come before us, but when we innovate we build in new ways, or in new directions.
What’s been your biggest a-ha moment — in life or work — so far?
Scholars of animal law often lament the lack of legal protection for animals. In my research on legal regulation of the United States dairy industry, I came to view this framing of “lack of law” as insufficient. Instead, I came to realize that law actually works to affirmatively promote certain kinds of relationships with farmed animals — and in the case of the U.S. dairy industry, it doesn’t merely allow, but actively encourages, practices that are harmful to cows and calves. This notion that law is not only the solution, but also part of the problem, has shaped my thinking ever since.
How do you or your team come up with your best ideas? (Do you have any rituals or habits that trigger your creative spark, for example? What do you do to create space for innovation?)
I come up with my best ideas when I’m reading work outside of my field. I’m often not aiming to come up with a new angle when I am, for example, reading a colleague’s work in another area of law. I find that when I am not thinking about my own research, but about some totally different area or problem, ideas relevant to my own research tend to sneak up on me.
What’s your favourite thing about working at the U of A?
I love the community I have found at University of Alberta. We have such a vibrant group of scholars innovating in so many different areas of research, with such a welcoming intellectual culture.
Do you have a role model at the U of A? How have they influenced you?
Chloe Taylor, a professor at the Faculty of Arts in the department of Women’s & Gender Studies, has been an incredible role model for me. She is a thoughtful and rigorous scholar who is constantly making connections and building community among scholars whose research interests touch on her own. As my own career develops, I hope to learn from Professor Taylor’s impressive capacity for building bridges across the disciplines, placing people and ideas in conversation, and communicating respectfully with thinkers of all kinds. In a field like critical animal studies, where there is so much work to be done to illuminate the urgency of the justice problems at stake, this kind of respectful dialogue across difference is especially crucial.
What’s next for you? Do you have any new projects on the horizon?
I am currently working on the place of animals in constitutional law. In previous work, I have studied constitutions that include explicit animal protection provisions. Presently, my research asks whether Canadian and other constitutional orders have commitments respecting animals that are “invisible” – i.e. not written in the constitutional text.
About Jessica
Jessica Eisen is an Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law. Her research interests include animals and the law, constitutional and comparative constitutional law, equality and antidiscrimination law, feminist legal theory, intergenerational justice, and law and social movements. Professor Eisen’s research has been published in the Journal of Law and Equality, Animal Law Review, Canadian Journal of Poverty Law, Transnational Legal Theory, Queen’s Law Journal, ICON: International Journal of Constitutional Law, University of British Columbia Law Review, University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, and elsewhere. She has studied at Barnard College, Columbia University (BA, Political Science and Human Rights Studies, 2004); The University of Toronto Faculty of Law (JD, 2009); Osgoode Hall Law School (LLM, 2014); and Harvard Law School (SJD, 2019); and has worked at WeirFoulds LLP, the Ontario Ministry of Labour, and the Constitutional Law Branch of the Ministry of the Attorney General for Ontario.
Innovator Spotlight is a series that introduces you to a faculty or staff member whose big ideas are making a big difference.
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